Get Ready For Super-Ultra-Gigantic Megapost!

So... I'm suddenly flush with goods fit for blogging, so rather than give you that unfortunate backward in time effect that blogs are so good at, I thought I'd just slam them all in one space. Thus this post will be list like, though ridiculous in this capacity, because the list contents will be no more than temporally and authorially related and all a great deal too long for the standard list format.

First: Required Viewing

First Book of Armaments 16:1 And then Peter took the holy disc from the great singularity and blessed it. First, he gave thanks to the singularity, appealing to its oneness and threeness alike, and he was filled with knowledge of the goodliness of his action. Then he spake unto his two companions, holding the great disc, a rarification of so much ephemeral and human, aloft and pleading: "Take this brothers, for these representations have resonance wherever we exist and are rightly a part of our canon. Play this in the rememberance of three. And be it a covenant in our life, everlasting, Amen". And so, the men partook in the sharing of this absurd delicacy... not so great within itself, but the key to much that memory and the spirit normally withhold. And they were quenched.

(I got kind of carried away with that... if you're able to pick it out from within that vaguely lutheran-flavored queef, one or both of you is smarter/crazier than I have yet imagined. The gist of it is that tonight I'm uploading the Darjeeling Limited to the FTP [it leaked yesterday, Fucking FINALLY], a movie whose numerology and Wes Anderson stamp make it an irresistible force for triumvirate nostalgia. It's taking me back to the life aquatic on a cold Edina night as I type.)

Second: Retarded Reading
This next one is a little more straightforward at first, and consists of only official act thus far as a technical Waldorf Alumnus: my pseudonymous submission to the lit-rag whose name has changed this year from the Muse to the Crusader, if my reports are correct. I'm not sure whether I like this one, but Laura told me that she did, and that it was compelling writing such that her co-editors might not get it... Hell, if she hadn't liked it I would have posted it on MinorTriad anyway.

Fear and Loathing in the Gap
by "Brad Rowncliffe" '07

Graduating from college is a whole new kind of death. For many it can be felt as a subtle end in the process of translation from the life of protected kinship to the life of the experimental, liberal individual.

I remember, vaguely, walking around in a robed horde of black-capped, beaming initiates. We were under fire; battery-fuel filled capacitors snapped, daze-inducing as we crept into the gigantic tent. I felt like an asshole. It isn't the kind of magic that people seem to like to invent when they talk about graduation, or when graduations are dramatized. There's an effervescence they try to depict, an idealized clicking and whirring of new social mechanisms set into motion by this event and a clear new momentum that thrusts these newly licensed thinkers out into the myriad tributaries feeding that bountiful current that is American Progress. But really, it isn't there.

All of those plastic smiling gazes and leaking tear ducts and bottles of champagne, what are they for? I don't think they're all that deep. They're the swiftest and surest sign of a dubious undercurrent that tugs at the Baby Boomers. For someone who has spent four years reorienting his or her thoughts around a framework of rational, self-referential, critique this kind of symbol floats in on a nauseating breeze and ruins the cake. There is hope strewn all over the place, but it is a stupid hope, a shored-up, bootstrapped vision of a future in which we apply ourselves wantonly to the task of Horatio Alger protagonism and everything comes out Hollywood.

So, what is the point of all this hoping, longing, planning for easy integration? Do our parents long for a world in which we assume all their baggage, their parents baggage? I suppose that would figure. A generation whose rebellion was easily as effective as the war in Vietnam, which it sought to quash, has been jaded into a more legalistic, cog-like lifestyle than even that of their depression-era parents. The "60's" is pure camp sold back to them and bought for their children, a goofy era that was the beginning and end of an ultimately silly counterculture. The world they live in is immovable and the idea that their children will bring or even witness great and radical change is both rhetorically powerful and safely laughable to them.

I think we are a generation divided. On the one side there are the privileged and the willing. Their parents have been carbon-copied, thus their "important" traditions carried on, albeit with an oblique artificiality that bespeaks this preservation, a new generation of brats is squeezed forth. I don't know what these people think of life on earth, life in the United States, but I hope they damn-well love it.

The other aisle is filled with catastrophists, catastrophists simply waiting for catastrophe. We live with a sincere wish for something authentically defining, an event which would stab into the softness of the ever-billowing boundaries that confine and proscribe our lives, which would lay bare the power relations that hobble our thinking and then violently explode them, leaving us with a clearer, messier, more visceral understanding of what the human animal needs and should value in life. We want something so inhumanely sublime in its scope, schedule and magnitude that there is simply no resisting the symbolic force of its many contexts. Something that mangles devastatingly and excretes communities whose task is to negotiate the form or to sputter and drown.

We understand, though perhaps we do not all think about it in these terms, that to be human, to be even an aborted fetus or retarded quadruple amputee, is to be among the luckiest and most improbably constituted matter in the universe. People are the side effects of raw atoms and energy and often they are way too worried about preserving that tiny, comprehensible slice of existence within which they can feel purposeful, meaningful and reasonable.

That's where I sit, right now. I do seemingly insane things every day in the service of systems that were broken before I was born. I am ultimately subjected to the whims of anyone who bears enough of the pure, rarified human agency of currency. I have no de facto recourse, even to reclaim the smallest bit of my biological habitat. I am a prosthetic beast whose ultimate happiness lies not in my ability to do good works or fulfill some other absurd criteria, but in my ability to somehow festoon all the aspects of my life, my body, my dare-I-say soul, so that I might incidentally feed my head with enough love, comfort, respect, excitement, suspense, ire... or some complex of emotions such that I continue respiration. I know there are better ways for me and for a whole lot of other people to get our biologically mandated jollies here on this planet. I am already way too lucky for this bullshit, and so are you.


Third: Zoom In
This is what happened when I ran out of Craigslisting for the day..... It kinda bugs me, but it's a little more personal than the other one, and it seems like stuff I'd joke about with you guys, or the conversation that I would manage to not have with my mother.

A Slice of Life:

I'm sitting here today with nothing to do but wait on answers which will likely never come. The arrival of any of these replies will signal that I have now progressed to any number of squares one, many of which are frankly quite exciting, but others of which lead down a path of belabored inquisition that ultimately terminates in an oddly arranged new schedule of drudgery. It is only via securing this sort of obligation that one of no means such as myself is able to remain free and alive.

For some reason, this experience also makes me want to write passages like the above.

I walk around, sometimes purposefully, in pursuit of one or more of these answers, other times just to get a new perspective on Portland. This was something I did during college, but not with any necessity and not often enough to scratch the surface of Portland's many views.

I haunt the Internet. Looking for anything that appears to have a job at the other end of it. I painstakingly craft Facebook status updates, they emerge in a range that should only be characterized as encompassing the involuntary utterances of the retarded - or perhaps autistic - to the mildly cannibalistic, schizophrenic. Recent entries have included my current address, which under the new Facebook status formatting conventions comes out to be something like "Peter apt. 8 4107 SE Gladstone St., Portland, OR, 97202."; entries which vaguely illuminate the nexus of my simultaneous longings for food and companionship, such as "Peter forages for interesting protein..."; and entries in which I make non-attempts at inside-humor with myself, like "Peter wishes he had more tea... ".

Specifically, I wanted some more of the shroom tea that I drank from a Nalgene bottle at a really fun party, and thought that the perfect way to assuage these feelings would be with a little foppish quip about me needing more tea displayed to the Faceworld. Beneath which, there would be me, the me that is hyper-present in the psilocybin-tickled brain, the me who feels no more at home than in an early fall garden: naked, hairy, panting, hair touching the back of my neck and shoulders, breath sharp and falling out in moist white tufts. I love being shocked at the number of fruits I can collect with two hands. My translucent skin, the flesh, bone and gristle beneath, suspend these juice filled bodies in a perfectly tight and delicate grip as I gallop around...

Anyway, today I need something for the status that makes it clear that while I am waiting for something, I'm not busy and I crave interruption. Not because I think anyone reads my Facebook status, but because I'm probably also going to vote in November, so I must believe in bullshit.